making clips and bits for music videos with PD Pro & Project Dogwaffle:

Playing with animated Textures and stock video footage from Marlin Studios

To probe further:

Flash-MX stream

(click to stop)  


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You may be familiar with or even have used the beautiful texture collections available at Marlin Studios:  www.marlinstudios.com

They also have looping or animated videos, typically used by architects for walk-throughs: People in Motion, Trees, etc...

There are two samples for free viewing in the People-in-Motion collection,. One of them is named MarkSmall and has a subfolder with a sequence of 300 Jpeg images of a walking man. There is another subfolder with 300 jpeg images containing the Alpha channel, one for each color image.

You can easily load just a subset of the frames. For example, the first 40 frames or so appear to be a full walk sequence. Load those through the Animation menu:

menu: Animation > Load Sequence...

load a sequence of images into PD Pro
You can click-drag-select the range of files you want to load. You can also Shift-click and Control-click to add/remove specific files, for example if you want to  grab only a sparse selection.

If your images don't appear in the dialog window, be sure to specify the type of files you're looking for. The default is the Targa format (*.tga files). If you are looking for Jpeg images, be sure to specify it in the search 'Pattern' field:
image file types available to load in sequence
Then click "Load Selected" and Dogwaffle will build an animation from the image sequence. PD Pro gets busy loading the selected files into a new animation.

computer stuff happening

The image sequence is loaded one image file at a time. Once loaded, you'll have an animation of the size of the images and the number of frames based on the number of files you selected to load.

filmstrip mode
Filmstrip mode in the Timeline scrubbar  (click to enlarge)

While playing the animation you may notice a slight hickup near the end - there are a few too many frames, and the legs jump back 2-3 frames. Delete the last frame and it improves.
delete the current frame
Delete another one or two and it will be perfect - a total of 38 frames (numbered 0 through 37) are all that's needed for one looping walk sequence. 

Now you can start applying all sorts of filters to that loop. Edge detection, Mystic vision, light diffusion, noise, jitter.... You may need to quickly get access to the unfiltered original. To do so, we recommend that you use

menu:  Animation > Save...

to save the current clip as a .dwa (Dogwaffle Animation) file. This is uncompressed but saves and reloads the fastest and with the fewest clicks (no codec selection needed).



Sample walking man:
Mark (Small)



alpha channel:



Original is 300 frames and
 includes several walk steps, exactly 10 seconds when played at 30 fps

here's a subset of  the sample:
reduced to just one looping walk sequence of 38 frames:
shortwalk.avi (147 kb)








Looking Forward




Having loaded the animation into PD Pro, w can do a number of things with it.


- Example 1

Transfer the animation into the brush.  Use the animated brush timeline editor to apply filters across the frames of the  brush, such as edge detection. Then use the Brush Keyframer to place and animate the new brush image sequence across  the frames of a new background animation, starting with black.  Keyframe the size to small and reduce the opacity.  Repeat this with a larger size and higher opacity to place the walking person in a nearby position that appears closer because of the size.  Repeat again for a 3rd person. Then once more close to the right edge.

A different approach is then used for another person, i.e. we also make the brush move from  right to left, and fade.

Here's the result. (Flash MX)
Flash MX video stream
direct links: AVI/Cinepak - Quicktime - Flash

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Another example:

direct links: AVI/Cinepak - Quicktime - Flash

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and another: this one has also a wave deformer, just about when the moving outline person matches the red/orange burning man.
adding a wave deformation blip
direct links: AVI/Cinepak - Quicktime - Flash







In addition to the wave deformer, there's some rain and lightning too.


directly:  Flash - Quicktime - mp4 - Avi

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Do More...
use Poser to make funky walk sequences
using Poser  to make funky walk sequences

Poser 5
only $79